Tag Archives: raising smart children

In “Color Me Purple,” my book for children ages 8-12, the character Gommgi is music smart. She loves music and is recognized for the excellence of her piano performances. In this photo, I met a music smart child in the making. The research says that smart children often hum and sing early, have the ability to reproduce songs easily, show a strong desire to play an instrument, and display an emotional sensitivity to music. Little Maeve, while playing at her Grandma’s, broke into lullaby as she hugged and rocked her doll. She decided her lilting version of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” needed piano accompaniment, and after playing one chorus invited me to join her in a duet version. Yes, Maeve definitely is showing an early love and talent in music!

One parent wrote of Color Me Purple: “The knowledge box about “Passion and Practice” resonated most with me today. Towards the bottom of page 13, you wrote, ‘Extrinsic motivations feed a student’s intrinsic motivation to work at becoming better. The challenge for teachers and parents is to encourage practice without killing intrinsic motivation.’ As I read that, I thought to myself, ‘Ain’t that the truth?!?’”

She went on to explain the fine line between encouraging and discouraging her 10-year-old son’s intrinsic interest in piano: “I’d noticed that he’d been spending a lot of his free time messing around at the piano whenever he had a spare moment, plunking out songs that he was attempting to sight read from music we happened to have laying around, or just playing by ear. I suggested to him that we set up piano lessons, and he agreed to give it a try. But, when songs were giving him trouble, he quickly became frustrated, and wanted to give up and quit. It became a battle for me to try to convince him to keep practicing.

“That’s when I realized that he was no longer playing JOYFULLY as he had been when he was playing for HIMSELF rather than playing to please someone else. As much as I value the important life lesson of developing grit and perseverance, I also want to value and honor my son’s desire to do what makes him happy, and I want to be sure that I am helping to nurture his talent rather than squelch it! One day he approached me calmly and explained to me that he LIKES playing the piano but that he does NOT LIKE taking lessons. He promised that if I would let him quit piano lessons he would continue playing on his own, for fun. So that’s what we did.

“Now he is playing the piano more than ever — by himself on his own terms. He’s not shying away from challenge either. I hadn’t realized that adding extrinsic pressure would threaten his intrinsic motivation in such an extreme way, and I’m relieved that we were able to restore his intrinsic desire to pursue his music smart!”

Children in a 2012-13 kindergarten immersion Spanish-language classroom received personal copies of Abuelita dice que es bueno ser inteligente for Christmas. At the end of the school year they wrote their own stories and shared them with me .

The teacher told me how one little boy had gained in confidence between December and May. Another little boy affirmed his teacher’s comment that he carried his copy of the book to and from school every day by taking it out of his backpack and showing me the sticker that marked it as his and his only!

Little Bird—Written by Germano Zullo; illustrated by Albertine, 2012. This book captivated me—at first with its illustrations and its silence—and then with its message. Turn the pages! OK, a truck is driving along a road—what is so special about that? Keep turning the pages. Following an improbable and glorious flock of birds being released into the wide open sky, we read, “One could almost believe that one day is just like another.” This is a touching story, told mostly in pictures, of a man and a bird, and so much more than how they help each other fly. “There are no greater treasures than the little things.Just one is enough to change the world.” What a powerful message!

This gem of a book has spare illustrations and few words. It won the French equivalent of the coveted Caldecott prize for children’s picture book illustration. I have given this to special friends of the heart as well as graduates. What a wonderful, encouraging book! I recommend you share it with those you love.

In school, there is a standard curriculum that is offered to all learners who are grouped according to age. This is an antiquated system, but it is the way we have been doing it since the industrial revolution, and—as I’ve written before, changing that system is not happening. Instead, it seems, it’s being exacerbated. On a recent edition of “60 Minutes,” Morley Safer examined the practice of redshirting children for kindergarten. Redshirting is defined at the beginning of the interview as “holding your 5-year old back from kindergarten until he’s 6 so he’ll be among the oldest and smartest in class.” One parent elaborated that she preferred her son be older in kindergarten so he would become a leader rather than be younger and a follower. All this was news to me—older equals smarter and leader.

Safer suggests that a sharp increase in redshirting is a direct response by parents to Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Outliers.” I was disturbed by this book when I read it, not because of Gladwell’s premises as much as by his conclusions. Gladwell’s comments on this show make me even more appalled. In January 2010, I quoted from the book regarding Gladwell’s observation that smart children studied by Lewis Terman who happened to be poor did not “make a name for themselves” as adults because “they lacked something that could have been given to them if we’d only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly for the world.” Gladwell saw them as squandered talent and I agree with him that they didn’t need to be.

Redshirting, however, is not helping poor children but most likely putting them at greater disadvantage. As the show pointed out, low-income parents can neither afford to hold their children back nor to send them to private schools. Redshirting is not “putting a community around them.”

I agree with Samuel Meisels, President of the Erikson Institute, who on the show calls redshirting “educational quackery.” I believe in “cumulative advantage” but not in the way Gladwell defines it. Cumulative advantage does not imply that older is better or that the older a child the greater his or her leadership potential. It means carefully planning special, supplemental educational experiences, starting early in school and continuing into college, graduate school, and professional life. It means studying deeply and broadly. It happens when students are introduced purposefully to concepts, programs, activities, career possibilities, and people, who in turn introduce them to more and more possibilities until the right one clicks. It happens when their learning activities are aligned with their interests, abilities, and motivations.

I agree with Meisels that children need a level playing field and that they develop at different rates. It is true that cumulative advantage is about being in the right place at the right time, and that it usually does not happen by coincidence. Ideally, we would be putting all children in the right place at the right time. The only way we are going to prevent the kind of squandered talent that Gladwell deems unfortunate is to open more and more doors of opportunity.

At its foundation, educational opportunity should not mean forcing all kids to learn the same curriculum at the same pace and with the same strategies—whatever their age. Let them start at age 3 if they are ready and a kindergarten classroom is where they’ll best develop. Let them start at age 6 if they are not ready and a delayed start will mean a better fit with the learning environment when they are ready.

May bullying and boredom never become a part of the conversation! Oh, my mistake, Meisels pointed out that behavioral problems and boredom are already being detected in these opposite-of-pushed children. I’ll not go there—for now.

I’ve been playing around with Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences in my mind. First, they are the basis for Color Me Smart, my current children’s book manuscript, which I may (or may not) publish in 2012. Second, as I’ve been reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, I couldn’t help trying to categorize Jobs within the eight intelligence types.

When I’m working on my book, it is with a degree of certainty — children need to be recognized and encouraged for all kinds of abilities. Teaching the multiple intelligences framework to children and their caregivers should help us, as a society, to be more appreciative of children’s innate strengths. Further, we could then be expected to encourage a greater degree of excellence in education and production. But there is also a degree of uncertainty. Many children are multiply intelligent, and to typecast them could potentially limit others’ understanding of them. I especially felt this when casting children as people- or self-smart when I had already perceived them as another kind of smart.

When reading the Jobs book, I felt an even greater degree of uncertainty. It was almost the opposite of what I was feeling with my child characters. I never doubted that Jobs was smart. But, what kind of smart? He certainly didn’t have interpersonal intelligence (people smart), yet even within this realm he ultimately succeeded by repeatedly forming and leading what he called an “A team.”

So what are multiple intelligences and where does Jobs fit? This is an especially intriguing question given Isaacson’s conclusion (p. 566): “Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power.”

According to Kac, what most geniuses have is “ordinary genius,” the kind that most of us might observe, “I could do that if only I were better at …” But the magician genius is such that we can’t fathom how the end result came about. Jobs consistently expected the seemingly impossible and made it happen. He didn’t achieve it himself; he led others to do it for him.

In rethinking Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences, I conclude that we are broadening our definition of smart or intelligence within the realm of the ordinary. And, I still think that’s a good place to start. We need to recognize word, music, math, picture, body, people, self, and nature smart in children, but maybe there is more. Just as I’ve never liked the federal definition of giftedness because it positions academic ability, intellectual ability, creativity, leadership, and artistic ability as parallel categories — and they are not, so magician genius does not seem to parallel multiple intelligences. Creativity and intuitive leaps must cross them all. Jobs had a talent for recognizing talent in others and bringing them together such that their individual abilities became a part of the whole. Together they fostered his magician genius. His magician genius crossed all aspects of excellence required in the design and engineering of the products for which he is known.

I wonder if Gardner is playing around with the concept of magician genius?

Every Sunday evening Liliana’s Restaurant in Fitchburg welcomes families, giving parents the opportunity to kick back, while their children (under age 12) eat free. This Sunday night there is an added bonus. I will be there, reading my book to children ages 0-7. If you live in the Madison, WI area or will be there for any reason on Sunday, Dec. 4, stop by anytime after 5 p.m. with your children.

I look forward to meeting you, exploring ideas with your children, and signing books as well.

Start your child off reading like this little guy. A world of wonder is the result.